Archive for the ‘Miller 4-45’ tag

In the mid-Teens, Frank E. Fithen of Steubenville, Ohio, made a name for himself by not just driving his cars at excessive rates of speed – at a time when a mile a minute was considered blazing speed, Fithen boasted of reaching 58 MPH – but also by driving them from one end of the country. He did this without GPS, without Interstate highways, and without arms.

Fithen, born about 1882, lost both arms in a railroad accident at age 9. How he got to riding bicycles and unicycles remains unrecorded, but he soon after began to demonstrate his abilities as an armless bicyclist and unicyclist as a street performer. That must have been quite the lucrative business, because in about 1912 or 1913, he switched to automobiles – specifically, a then-new Oakland runabout, a 60hp, six-cylinder beast, massive at a 130-inch wheelbase and expensive at $2,400 (or about three times the most expensive Model T). He then fitted it with a special steering wheel of his own design, one with a series of rings within the rim of the wheel that he could fit the stumps of his arms into. A Popular Science article from a few years afterward notes that Fithen was able to use his stumps to manipulate the hand throttle as well, while he used his feet to operate the pedals and emergency brake.

Images courtesy quasi-modo.net

He thus set off to tour the country, making a living through promotional appearances and by selling postcards of himself along the way (thus the reason so many Fithen postcards exist in the antiques market today). By the time of the Popular Science article, he had put 85,000 miles on the Oakland. An article in the Ogden (Utah) Standard two years later noted that he had driven a total of 115,000 miles by that point.

It’s to the Oakland that Fithen gives credit for the ease with which he is able to drive. Aside from a specially constructed steering wheel… there is no special equipment on his car. He shifts gears with his feet and he can change a wheel in only a few minutes longer time than the average motorist.

In three years he has shipped it only twice, once was across Lake Michigan and once was in Texas where mud delayed him and he had an engagement at a fair. Several times he has driven through where other motorists were shipping.

Image courtesy TheOldMotor.com

Unsurprisingly, Fithen was also visiting every Oakland dealership in the country, so it seems he had secured himself a position as spokesman and astroturfer for the company. Interestingly, other photographs of Fithen show him in a 45hp Miller with fitted a steering wheel of a slightly different design. Presumably, that would have been the Detroit-built Miller, a roadster on a 110-inch wheelbase manufactured from 1911 to 1914, which very likely makes it the precursor to Fithen’s Oakland.

Nobody seems to know what ultimately happened to Fithen. He was married, but we have yet to find any mention of him after 1917. Yet, as we discovered, he was not the only armless driver on the roads of America at that time.

Like Fithen, Quentin D. Corley lost both arms in a railroad accident. However, Corley, born in 1884 in Mexia, Texas, lost both arms as a 21-year-old stenographer, and he lost one arm entirely – including the shoulder. With his initial career cut short, Corley went to law school and eventually became a Dallas County judge, but he also became a prolific inventor and as early as 1913 developed a prosthetic arm that – in conjunction with a steering wheel accessory much like a necker’s knob – allowed him to drive the Model T in the photo above. Corley died in 1964 at age 80.